An open letter

Dear restaurant owner,

You didn't open a restaurant to make websites. We know.

But while you're in the kitchen, someone three streets away is asking their phone where to eat tonight. Maybe they search Google. More and more, they ask an AI assistant ("somewhere good for dinner near me, with vegetarian options, open late") and get one confident answer back.

That answer is built from whatever the internet knows about you. Right now, that might be a review from 2021, a photo of last year's menu that a customer uploaded, and Google's best guess at your Sunday hours.

Your restaurant is already being described online. The only question is whether you're the one describing it.

Instagram is wonderful for showing off the food. But it's a feed, not a menu. Your prices are buried in a post from March, your hours are in a highlight, and most of it is hard for search engines and AI assistants to read, and hard for customers to find.

And if your menu is a PDF, you know the routine: change a price, open the file, edit it, export it, upload it again, and hope the old version isn't still floating around. Even then, it only speaks one language.

We built Solo Menus to fix all of that. Your website is the page the internet goes to when it wants to know about you, so it might as well be yours.

This is a small thing. That's the point.

We're not going to tell you a website will double your business. It won't. What it can do is win you a couple more tables a week: the tourist who could read your menu in English, the couple who checked you were open before they walked over, the family who could see which dishes contain nuts.

Do the math for your own place. Two extra guests a week, spending 25 each, comes to about 2,600 a year, in whatever currency you count in. For ten minutes of work, once.

Why we built this

Most restaurant website tools are built for someone else: for chains, for delivery platforms that take a cut of every order, for agencies that bill by the hour. They want to be your ordering system, your booking system, your loyalty program and your marketing department, and they charge you accordingly, month after month.

We want to be one page. Your page.

So here's what we won't do:

• Take a commission on your orders. We don't take orders at all.
• Put ads on your site, or track your guests. There's no cookie banner, because there's nothing to consent to.
• List you in a directory next to the restaurant down the street.
• Make you learn a website builder. If you can fill in a form, you can do this.

It's free. It stays free.

A real website, with your menu, your languages and your QR code, costs you nothing. Not a trial, and no card. Free sites carry a small "Made with Solo Menus" badge in the corner; that's how the next owner finds us.

If you build your site on our free plan, it stays free.

Be the source.

You already know your restaurant better than anyone: what's on tonight, what's in the sauce, when the kitchen closes. Put it where people, and the machines they ask, can find it.

Take ten minutes. Snap a photo of your menu, and we'll turn it into a website in your languages, with your allergens marked and a QR code ready to print. If it isn't worth it, you've lost ten minutes. If it is, you've gained a couple of tables a week for as long as you're open.

We'll be here.

P.S. Curious what the internet says about you right now? Ask ChatGPT about your restaurant: your hours, your menu, whether you have vegetarian dishes. Then decide whether you'd like to be the one answering.